Sometimes a Great Notion

by Ken Kesey

  "Hsst! Listen. I hear one--"

  Teddy's electric killing device holds a great fascination for Henry; during some gusty preamble--eyes half closed, smile nostalgic with mellow reminiscence--he will suddenly freeze in midword. "Hsst! Hsst! Listen now . . ." He cocks a white-fuzzed ear toward the grid as some yet unseen victim buzzes closer. "Listen . . . Listen . . ." There is a sizzling spurt of blue. The parched carcass falls to join its predecessors on the doorstep. Henry cracks the tabletop with his cane.

  "Son of a gun! You see that? Got a nother one, didn't it? Lord, lord, if they don't make some foxy outfits these days then I'll eat your goddam hat. Modrun scientific technologee: that's the ticket. I said so all along; ever since I seen the first winch an' cable rigged to snake out spruce I been saying so. Ah, I tell you we come a long ways. I can recall--an' I swear this is the truth--but you know it's goddam hard to believe the way it was sometimes, because things changing so all the time, every day . . . I still say we'll whip it Boney, you old sobersides--anyhow, let me think, it was durin' Coolidge, I think . . ."

  A young Henry with a fashionable black mustache skitters nimble as a squirrel up the trunk of a log lodged against a steep hill, and with hands like flickering steel frees drunk cousin Larimore from the tangle of oxen reins. A swift, grim, taciturn young Henry, carrying a compass in every pocket of his trousers and a boning knife in a scabbard on his boot . . .

  "Listen! Don't you hear? Ah . . . ahh . . . bing! There. Son of a gun, ain't that somethin'? Got a nother one."

  At the back of the bar Ray and Rod, the Saturday Night Dance Band, dressed now in weekday Levis and work shirts, sit across from each other, writing letters to a girl in Astoria.

  "How do you spell 'disparaging'?" Ray asks.

  "Spell what . . . ?"

  " 'Disparaging,' for the luvachrist; 'dis-paraging'! Don't you know shit? Dis-paraging, like, say for an instance: 'I get a definite feeling he is writing you disparaging lies and remarks about me.' "

  "Hold on a minute." Rod makes a grab for Ray's letter. "Who are you writing? Come on, give, give."

  "Watch it, Jack. Just cool it with the hands. Just cool it, all right? Because I'll write to whoever I--"

  "You're writing to Rhonda Ann Northrup!"

  "--to who-goddam-ever I take a notion that--"

  "Are you? Because the fur is really gonna fly if I find out."

  "Now is that a fact."

  "The shit is really gonna hit the fan."

  "Is that the truth now."

  "You better believe that's the truth."

  They go back to their writing. It has been the same ever since they teamed up to play small-town dance bars eight years ago, fighting, bickering over the same woman, each confiding in her that before long he aims to split from that ginhead who's been holding him back, leave this mud wallow and make it big with Decca or Capitol or maybe even TV . . . at odds with each other eternally, yet eternally bound by failure and the need for some excuse for that failure. "If it wasn't for that danged tin-eared square holdin' me back, honey, I'd be long gone from this pest-hole." They write laboriously with a grinding of teeth. After a moment Ray looks toward the other end of the bar, where old Henry is pounding home a dramatic point in his story by striking a chair with his cane; he spits between his teeth to the floor.

  "Will you listen to that old fool carry on up there? You'd think he's deef, wouldn't you? Loud as he talks? He rides right over anything anybody else might say, just like a deef man."

  "Maybe he is. He's old enough to be deef."

  But at the other end of the bar the old man's interest in the fate of certain flies shows a nearly superhuman acuteness of ear. "Listen! Hear him? Hear him? Assssh bingo!"

  "Jee-zus Christ! Let me have a dime and I'll see if I can drown him out."

  The jukebox whirs, caressing its coin, throbbing light and mechanical sound. Ray returns to this seat, whistling a memorized steel guitar intro between his big teeth:

  A jewel here on earth, a jew-wul in heaven,

  She's one of the diamonds around God's great throne. . . .

  He is pleased with his tone. I'll be up there someday, he tells himself. "Grand Ol' Opry." Memphis, Tennessee. I'll make it. My day is coming. Leave these squares. Dust 'em all. Rod, old buddy, face it, your beat is beginning to drag like your butt. And Rhonda Ann, you're a pretty fair punch but nothing to write home to mother about . . .

  "You boys mark it down," Henry exclaimed at the other end of the bar. "We are gonna whip it, we by god are gonna!" What it was that Henry was going to whip no one ever knew for certain, but of his convictions there could be no doubt. "All this new equipment, new methods . . . we are gonna lay it low!"

  "How do you spell 'recently'?" Rod was now having trouble.

  "The same as I did a while back," Ray told him. "A-yuk a-yuk." Yes sir man, dust 'em all. Memphis, Tennessee, make way for me!

  "Our day is coming," Henry announced.

  "No. Oh no no no." Boney Stokes, searching out tragedy the way a brush bear searches out garbage cans, found reason to rejoice his own way in spite of the rampant optimism. "No, we are old, Henry. Our day is ending, our skies are turning black."

  Henry whooped his derision. "Bosh! Black? Just you look out yonder at that glow-rus sunset, does that look black to you?"

  Oregon October, when the fields of timothy and rye-grass stubble are being burned, the sky itself catches fire. Flocks of wrens rush up from the red alder thickets like sparks kicked from a campfire, the salmon jumps again, and the river rolls molten and slow . . .

  Down river, from Andy's Landing, a burned-off cedar snag held the sun spitted like an apple, hissing and dripping juices against a grill of Indian Summer clouds. All the hillside, all the drying Himalaya vine that lined the big river, and the sugar-maple trees farther up, burned a dark brick and over-lit red. The river split for the jump of a red-gilled silver salmon, then circled to mark the spot where it fell. Spoonbills shoveled at the crimson mud in the shallows, and dowitchers jumped from cattail to cattail, frantically crying "Kleek! Kleek!" as though the thin reeds were as hot as the pokers they resembled. Canvasback and brant flew south in small, fiery, faraway flocks. And in the shabby ruin of broken cornfields rooster ringnecks clashed together in battle so bright, so gleaming polished-copper bright, that the fields seemed to ring with their fighting.

  This is Hank's bell.

  He and Lee and Joe Ben watched the sinking sun as the boat rocked down the big river. It was the first evening in all the weeks Lee had been working that they'd run the river home with the sun still up to light their way.

  This is Hank's bell ringing.

  "We've been lucky," Hank said. "You know that? We've had enough fall this year to make up for the last three early winters."

  Joe Ben nodded avidly. "Oh yeah, oh boy yeah. Didn't I tell you it was gonna be that way? Oh yeah, we're in the good Lord's pocket. Lots of good log-cutting weather . . . say, didn't I say so this morning? Was gonna be a bountiful day, a blessful day."

  The little man thrashed ecstatically about the front of the boat, jerking his torn face from side to side in a frenzied attempt to miss nothing. Hank and Lee turned to share a brief grin of amusement behind his knotted back. And also shared, in spite of themselves, some of the very enthusiasm they were smiling about. For it had been a blessful day, the blessfullest day, Lee had to admit, since he'd returned to Oregon. The day had started blessful, with the filbert-and blackberry-filled coffee cake Viv had baked for breakfast, and had seemed to get better as it went along; the air that greeted them in the yard was cold and sour with the smell of apples turning to vinegar beneath the trees; the sky was clear but it threatened none of the previous week's stinging heat; the tide was coming in perfect and carried them up river at top speed . . . then--and perhaps best, Lee thought, perhaps the true beginning of the blessful day came when they had given Les Gibbons his usual free ferry-ride across and deposited him, still jabbering, on the bank near his car; he had turned to call
over his shoulder just how he wanted once more to say thanks and how he wanted them to know he sure did hate bein' beholden an' sure did hay-ay-ate!--had slipped, with his lips trailing the last word, scrambling like a drunken ape, back down the bank into the icy water beside the boat.

  Hank and Joe Ben howled with laughter as he surfaced, blowing and cursing, and Les's phony good-fellowship shattered under the laughter. He clung dripping to the side of the boat and screamed in unleashed fury that he hoped the whole motherjumpin' Stamper brood o' them was drownt! The whole horse-laughin' brood was wrecked and killed and drownt! And good motherjumpin' riddance to bad motherjumpin' rubbish--!

  Lee had smiled at the man's uncontrolled frustration and then had laughed out loud at the cool and Christian way his big brother had fished him back into the boat and asked sympathetically, as a patient policeman might question a hysterical child, did Leslie want to go wet into town like a rat fished from the well? Or did he want to be toted back across for a change into different clothes? "Because we'll sure wait on you, Les, if you want to go back up to your place and get into a dry outfit; whatever you say. . . ."

  Les swallowed, and swallowed again. He pulled his blue lips back from his chattering teeth in a grotesque attempt to smile. "Ah, Hank, naw, naw I c-couldn't put you boys out th-th-thataway."

  Hank shrugged. "Whatever you say, Les old buddy." Then with heavy concern Hank stepped out of the boat to lead the shivering man up the bank by the hand.

  In spite of the delay the swift up-river tide seemed to double the speed of their boat and they arrived at the waiting crummy still way ahead of schedule. The crummy started easily. The civet cat that boarded under the hood fled in his usual humpbacked fit of pique but for the first time since he'd moved in fired no parting volley at his tormentors. Uncle John arrived without a hangover and cheerfully offered a stick of Beeman's to everyone; Andy played a gay tune on his mouth organ instead of his usual morning dirge as they drove; and just as they crested Breakleg Ridge a few miles from the show a big four-point sidled out onto the road and practically flagged them down. As they skidded to a stop, he sidled off the road to a leafy clearing, then waited politely for Hank to claw his little .22 Hi-Standard out of the toolbox and fit one of the half-dozen baby nipples he carried in the glove compartment over the barrel. The shot made a small spitting sound, shredding the nipple and nicking the buck's spine just behind the neck where Hank had aimed; the deer dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Joe and Hank and Andy, working side by side with a speed that would have won respect at the gutting bench at the salmon cannery, bled the big deer, cleaned him, severed his head and hoofs, and had the evidence buried in less than five minutes. There was even a hollow stump next to the clearing the deer had chosen. "Mighty accommodating fellow," Hank acknowledged as he heaved the carcass into the hollow and covered it with a spray of huckleberry.

  "Oh you dingdang right!" Joe Ben had said. "We're in God's pocket today. Ever'thing is gonna be milk an' honey! Ever'thing is gonna be abundant! Ever'thing is gonna be with us today 'cause ain't it obvious? Ain't it? The Holy Signals are on the Stampers' side today, you just watch if they ain't."

  Even the donkey, even that vengeful conglomeration of wire and noise and time-brittled cast iron seemed to have been affected by the Holy Signals. During the whole day dragging two-ton logs back to the spar tree, while Joe perched on its seat, singing against the shriek of the engine, jamming levers, tromping pedals with the beat of the song as he played the machine like some infernal organ, it had broken down only once. There was a screaming jolt; the gears had frozen in the cable drum. But even then the Signals were consistent, the luck held; instead of having to shut down to send for parts, Hank waded into the trouble with a pair of pliers and a ballpeen hammer and overcame it in such short order that he'd scarcely used any of the usual names he kept reserved for the malingering machine. All the rest of the day it ran like a clock. In fact, all that day the equipment--the chain saws, the cat, the yarder--had behaved in a manner as polite and accommodating as that of the buck.

  "Do you realize," Hank said, "that we sent eight truckloads down to the river today. By God, eight. That's the biggest cutting since--Lord, since I don't even remember, probably since we were working that state park where it was all roaded and flat, and I feel pretty good if anybody wants to know, pretty motherin' good!" He released the steering handle of the motor, and the boat rushed on straight as an arrow while he stretched and cracked his vertebrae. As he came out of the stretch he punched Lee playfully on the shoulder. "What about it, bub? How do you feel? You probably threw cable around more logs than ever before; you noticin' any repercussions?"

  Lee rolled his shoulders against the pull of the suspenders. "It's strange," he reflected, half embarrassed. "I don't know, but I'm not really so tired, now that you mention it. Do you suppose I've become immune?"

  Hank winked at Joe Ben. "You mean to tell me you don't feel like you'll 'expire of exhaustion' before you climb up to that room? Why, fancy that."

  "To be perfectly honest, Hank, I feel halfway decent for the first time since I was sentenced to that cable."

  Hank returned to his motor, ducking his chin and smiling into his fist. Lee saw the smile and added hurriedly, "But don't think I'm being lulled into some false sense of optimism by my recovery. Everything just happened to go well today. Pure coincidence. And it may happen again once in the next month, though I don't count on it. It may happen, another of Joe's blessful days, but would either of you care to bet some money that we have anything but the usual hell tomorrow? Care to bet we get another eight truckloads? Huh? I didn't think so."

  Joe Ben aimed his finger at Lee. "But you got to admit this was a blessful day, don't you? Oh yeah!" Joe beat his fist gleefully in his palm. "You got to admit I was right about today's signals."

  "Joby," Hank said, "I ever find the tiniest proof that days like this comes from mystical signals I swear I'll start goin' to church with you and help you figure the signals myself."

  Lee shaded his eyes against the sun behind Joe's shoulder. "I will have to say, Joe, that the woods actually seemed more benevolent today. No vines reached to trip me. No branches tried to snatch my eyes out. And most of all, you know most of all what I noticed?--and I don't know if this means anything to you dedicated lumberjacks--but I noticed that all day long there were holes under all the logs. Saints be praised, holes! There is nothing more maddening than throwing a cable over a log the size of a Queen Mary, only to find you have to tear a hole under the monster to get the cable around."

  "Oh! Hey by golly." Joe Ben laughed, pounding Hank on the knee. "You know what's happening? You see what's comin' over this boy? He's getting the call. He's hearin' the gospel of the woods. He's forsakin' all that college stuff and he's finding a spiritual rediscovery of Mother Nature."

  "Horse manure," Hank disagreed softly. "Lee's gettin' in condition is all. This is making a man out of him. He's toughening up."

  Joe Ben barely paused. "Same thing, don't you see? Sure. Now, I want you boys to think about all the signals--"

  "Horse manure," Hank snorted, interrupting Joe's expanding theory. "I still say all's happening is he's getting in shape. When he showed up here three weeks ago he was dying of diarrhea of the brain. Lord almighty, Joby, you give me three weeks to shape somebody up, hell yes the signals are going to be right!"

  "Yeah but--yeah but those three weeks! wasn't they more'n sweat an' stumble? God helps them, don't it say, that helps themselves? You got to consider all the facets . . ."

  And, shifting himself to a more comfortable position, Joe Ben folded his hands behind his head, gazed happily at the clouds overhead, and launched into an exuberant theory involving the physical body, the spiritual soul, choker chains, astrological signs, the Book of Ecclesiastes, and all the members of the Giant baseball team, who, it seemed, had all been blessed by Brother Walker and the whole congregation at Joe's request the very day before their current winning streak!

  Lee s
miled as Joe Ben talked, but gave the sermon only a part of his attention. He rubbed his thumb over the knobs of callus building in his palm and wondered vaguely at the strange flush of warmth he was feeling. What was happening to him? He closed his eyes and watched the last rays of the sun dance across his eyelids. He lifted his chin toward the color. . . . What was this feeling?

  A pair of pintails flushed from the rushes, started up by Joe Ben's joyous arguments, and Lee felt the drumming of those wings beat at his chest in delirious cadence. He took a deep breath, shuddering . . .

  The river moves. The dog pants in the cold moonlight. Lee searches his bed until he finds the book of matches. He relights his minuscule cigarette and writes again, with it burning between his lips:

  And Peters, as you shall hear, more than memory is affected by this country: My very reason was for a time debauched--I was beginning to like it, god help me. . . .

  The boat touched in against the dock. The hounds boiled from beneath the house. Joe Ben sprang out to grab the bow rope and flip it about a post. From the bank, plucking stiff and crinkly linens off the clothesline, Viv watched the three men step from the boat into the pack of dogs.

  "You're early," she called.